I took my first Japanese class yesterday, and I am excited in what I can learn already. Just for practice purposes with typing japanese I am going to post some really elementary sentences below. Can you just check to make sure they are sound?

わたしわ日本語の学生です。

あなたわフランス語の学生でわりません。

This didn't come out too well in google translator when I double-checked it, but they are supposed to be "I am a Japanese-Language student" and "I am not a French-Language student"

Any comments and critisizms(can't speak english either apparently) are openly accepted.

nothing big, just a typo on there, it should be desu rather then ndesu. i just dont want people to get confused. no japanese words start with 'n' alone, they can be na, ni, nu, ne, or no, tho. anyway thats all for now.

私の名前はセスです。
Watashi no namae ha seth desu.
[英訳] The ko (accumulated wisdom) of an old man is more precious than the ko (shell) of a tortoise.
「甲」と「劫」が同音であるところからできたことわざ。「劫」は極めて長い時間のことをいう。年長者の経験は尊ぶべきである。

yah, a lot of time it produces jibberish, but it also works pretty good. i copied and pasted Eyaw_Nayr's first sentence but it produced gibberish. then i copied and pasted Schattenjedi's first post on this and it came out as "I dont understand French". so sometimes, it does work.

But the same sentence E-J gives 私はフランス語を理解しない, which I wouldn't recommend saying. Any time that it does give a remotely appropriate answer just will be a fluke and at the same time so incredibly easy that there is no point looking.

Do not use babble fish or any other automatic translator for anything more than entertainment (which can be quite fun... after a few minutes of translating from language to language, my brother once got "I keep extreme by the english cake" out of "I like cake very much".)
I've tried putting in even the simplest of sentences, and it still manages to mess everything up... The languages are simply too different to translate automatically - even if a human were to translate japanese directly into english, it would come out incomprehensable.
I do like how you can tell when japanese is automatically translated to english, though. People constantly refer to themselves, you, and all other omitted subjects as "it" :p

Last edited by CajunCoder on Sun 05.21.2006 3:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.